Sonic Bloom in the Media

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With a cold Minnesota winter coming on and limited space in which to carry on his early experiments in a VHA-financed home, Carlson took a big step: he spent 88 cents on a tropical Gynura aurantiaca or purple passion vine. Known also as a velvet plant, native to the Indonesian island of Java, its fleshy teardrop leaves are densely covered with violet veins and hairs, and its yellow-orange dishlike flowers exude a nasty smell. But to Carlson, this was his cherished baby. Once a month, with a cotton swab, he applied doses of nutrients to the top of his vegetal pet, almost homeopathically weak doses, while simultaneously getting it to 'listen' to his sonics. The swabbing turned the top a withering brown, but quickly a new sprout burgeoned forth one leaf below the dead tip to grow at an accelerated rate. Within a few days, the original tip had completely recovered and was spurting rapidly ahead, both shoots exhibiting thick, healthy stalks and exceptionally large leaves.

As the vine crawled upward out of its pot, Carlson screwed teacup hooks into the wall of his kitchen, 6 inches apart, to support it, and so fast did the vine race for the hooks he had to add half a dozen every week.

At which point he made another startling discovery. If he snipped the growing tips with scissors, the Javanese plant, far from daunted, put out a new shoot at the first leaf node below the cut.

As novel as this seemed to Carlson, he was even more puzzled by his pet's growing not only the teardrop leaves characteristic of its species but also saw-toothed ones typical of its Indian cousin Gynura sarmentosa, along with completely alien split leaves previously never seen on any purple passion plant. The sound-plus-solution treatment appeared to be strangely affecting something to do with his vine's genetic qualities even as it grew.

In a paper on his experiment submitted to his profession, Carlson presciently asked: "Does one cell of a plant genus contain all the characteristics of all the species of that genus? If not, why has my plant, grown from a Gynura aurantiaca cutting, developed leaves, over 90% of its length, peculiar to the Gynura sarmentosa and, at the same time, exhibited an entirely new split-leaf form? Could the combined application of nutrient and audio energy result in such a rapid growth rate that the very process of evolution is condensed? Have I enabled my plant to adapt more quickly to its environment? Is this the reason for the different leaf characteristics appearing on one plant? If any of these questions can be answered 'yes, can this knowledge be applied to other plants? Could food crops be treated to achieve more rapid growth and better adaptability to their own or alien environments?"

As winter wore into spring and summer into fall, Carlson noticed another oddity: his plant had bloomed not the usual once but twice. Even more fantastic was its incredibly extending length. In only the first three months, the vine, which normally never exceeds a length of 18 to 24 inches, had grown a total stem of 150 feet !!! During the rest of the year, it pushed on at the same rate, out of the kitchen through a 1.5-inch hole bored in the wall leading to the living room, where it roved back and forth along the ceiling on wires strung 18" apart to attain a length of over 1/10 of a mile.

During the next year, Carlson began snipping 4" shoots from his vine, which he started in small plastic pots. Four hundred of these, labeled with his address and phone number and a request to call him for a replacement should the shoots die; he took to a flea market, where they rapidly sold for $4 apiece.

"I had many calls," he reminisced, "but none were to complain about sick or dying plants. Instead, the callers wanted to know why the offshoots from my mother plant were growing 20, 30, 40, 50 feet long, and even more. I at once thought that this unheard-of development might give rise to the possibility of whole new strains of hardier super flora.

Despite this achievement, worthy of Luther Burbank, when Carlson, in happy excitement, asked members, so his university committee, to come to his house to see for themselves what he had done, their only reaction amounted to a yawn.

Didn't he realize, they asked, that, because his results had been obtained on a non-edible house plant, they were of no commercial value or interest? (Despite the fact that he had made $1,600 from a plant that cost him 88 cents).

Desperate to get anything into the public record that would substantiate his achievement, Carlson wrote to Guinness Superlatives Limited in Middlesex, England, publisher of the famous Guinness Book of World Records, which sent to Minnesota to check his claim "specialists in the matter of freaks in the plant kingdom."

Carefully measuring his plant's stem, inch by inch over its entire length, the freak specialists congratulated Carlson. That same autumn, the new edition of the record book had an entry on page 113 extolling his find. To counter the notion that his new method was commercially valueless, Carlson next began to supply portable sonic equipment and nutrient mix to backyard gardeners who had called him after the Minneapolis Star ran a huge photo of the Carlson family standing under the passion plant, its leaves intertwined in the supporting chain of a chandelier before proceeding, through additional holes in the wall, into his children's bedrooms.

Not to be outdone, the St Paul Dispatch, describing his African violets, with more than 400 blooms in a full spectrum of colors, and his morning glories, purple, blue, white, red, and pink, as enveloping his house from its foundation to its roof eaves, quoted Carlson as foreseeing a Jack-and-the-Beanstalk world with gigantic flora capable of feeding multitudes while their stomata increased the Earth's supply of oxygen.

It occurred to Carlson that if Luther Burbank could coax a spiny cactus into losing its thorns by informing the plant that is no longer needed them because he would 'protect it,' (see "Secret Life of Plants), he too might get his climbing plants to adapt to human desires.

"I subscribed to Burbank's idea," Carlson told us, "that at the highest level, plants are capable of creating what is in the mind of man as a means of assuring their survival into future generations. I did not discount the many stories about trees which had borne no flowers or fruits for years, suddenly blossoming and bearing when threatened with an axe."

One spring, as he collected the seeds from his morning glories for successive annual planting, Carlson and his 12-year-old daughter, Justine, meditated on how to get the vines to respond to their lovingly felt desires by focusing on their favourite hues, purple for Dan, pink for Justine. "We believed," said Carlson, "that the plants might respond to the colors we favoured and draw closer to us as we were mentally and emotionally drawing closer to them." By late summer, when the vines were putting out the usually mixed spectrum of blooms over most of Dan's house, he found massed all around his daughter's bedroom window nothing but pink flowers and around his own bedroom window only purple ones.

"This confirmed to me," he said, "that we can, in some still undefined way, communicate with plant life, which is even capable of altering the colors of flowers and the shapes of leaves. It must somehow be based on trust. The plants must feel your intent and realise that if they respond, you'll save their seeds from assuring their flourishing continuance."

Even more intriguing was Carlson's belief that his method would allow him to determine the very likes and dislikes of plants. By exposing them to a varied menu of nutrients hitherto unavailable to them, he aimed, through their reactions, to find out which selections they might prefer, instead of just forcing them to accept what is believed is good for them.

This, he hoped, might ultimately lead to the elimination of deficiencies resulting in bad-tasting fruit or vegetables and the eradication of plant disease. "What I began to realise," said Carlson, "was that my method was challenging the seeds' potential, a potential maximised with the right number of Sonic Bloom®  sprays - which have turned out to be 5 - put on two weeks apart." Striking a massive fist on the table for emphasis, he added: "I believe I've come across a new principle that can be called indeterminate growth! It shatters the idea that plants are genetically limited to a given particular size or yield."

This belief in a lack of limitation led Carlson to another principle: geometric progression. We began regularly to discover that plants treated during one growing season would pass along whatever changes were taking place in them and create, right through their seeds, a successive generation 50% larger and more fruitful, even when the new generating plants remained untreated with Sonic Bloom. I also call this genetic elasticity the latent ability of plants to exhibit characteristics hidden in their gene pools, pulling out advantageous ones that may have been hidden for hundreds of years. This is connected to the ever-bearing trait brought out in McClurg's oranges."